Gulftown contains six cores, though HyperThreading doubles that tally to twelve as far as the operating system is concerned. The chip is expected to contain 12MB of L3 cache. It'll sit on an LGA 1366 socket and connect to three channels of DDR 3 memory clocked at up to 1333MHz.

The chip itself was hidden away in a large black tower case - and would have been hidden by a hefty fan, in any case - so here's a snap of Windows Task Manager while the CPU was handling a 3D rendering operation:

The chip is expected to run at 2.4GHz - Intel was keeping mum on the demo machine's CPU frequency.

It will work with Intel's existing X58 chipset, which will be more than a year old once Gulftown appears early next year. ®